‘This will bring you bad luck, Monsieur Maigrat. Just you wait and see.’
Now her only chance was the bourgeois at La Piolaine. If they didn’t part with a hundred sous, then she and her family might as well all lie down and die. She had turned left on to the track that led to Joiselle. The Board’s office stood here, at the corner of the road, a veritable palace of brick where the bigwigs from Paris all came to hold their grand dinners every autumn, together with princes and generals and various people in the government. As she walked along she was already mentally spending the hundred sous: first bread, then some coffee; after that, a quarter kilo of butter, and a bushel of potatoes for the morning soup and the vegetable stew in the evening; and lastly perhaps a little brawn, because Maheu needed his meat.
The priest at Montsou, Father Joire, was passing by, holding up his cassock with the fastidiousness of some large and well-nourished cat that does not wish to get itself wet. He was a gentle sort and affected to take no interest in anything in the hope that he might anger neither the workers nor their bosses.
‘Good-morning, Father.’
He kept on walking, smiling at the children and leaving her stranded in the middle of the road. She had no religion, but she had momentarily imagined that this priest might be about to give her something.
And off they went again, through the black, sticky mud. They still had two kilometres to go, and the little ones, rather put out and no longer finding this fun, needed more and more to be dragged. To the right and left of the road followed a succession of yet more derelict patches of waste ground surrounded by rotting fences and yet more smoke-stained factory buildings bristling with tall chimneys. When they reached open country, the vast, flat earth spread out before them, an ocean of brown, upturned soil stretching away to the purple line of the Vandame forest on the horizon and without even a single tree to suggest the presence of a mast upon its waves.
‘Mummy, Mummy, carry me.’
And she carried them each in turn. There were puddles in the pot-holed road, and she had to hitch up her skirt so as not to be all dirty when they arrived. Three times she nearly fell, the damned cobblestones were so slippery. And when they finally came out at the front steps of the house, two enormous dogs rushed at them, barking so loudly that the little ones started screaming with fright. The coachman had to use his whip.
‘Leave your clogs here and come in,’ said Honorine.
In the dining-room mother and children stood stock-still, dazed by the sudden warmth and feeling very uncomfortable at being stared at by this old gentleman and this old lady stretched out in their armchairs.
‘My child,’ said the latter, ‘it’s time for your little deed.’
The Grégoires delegated the distribution of alms to Cécile. It was their idea of giving her a good education. One had to be charitable, they said, their house was God’s house. Moreover, they flattered themselves that they were intelligent about their charity, being forever concerned that they should not be duped and encourage evil ways. Hence they never gave money, never! Not so much as ten sous, not even two sous, because, of course, as everyone knew, the moment you gave the poor so much as two sous, they drank them. And so their alms were always given in kind, and particularly in the form of warm clothing, which they distributed to destitute children during the winter.
‘Oh, the poor little darlings!’ cried Cécile. ‘Just look how pale they are after their long walk in the cold!…Honorine, quick, go and fetch the parcel. It’s in my wardrobe.’
The servants, too, looked at these poor wretches with that compassion tinged with guilt which is felt by those who know where their next meal is coming from. While the chambermaid went upstairs, the cook, not thinking, set the remainder of the brioche down on the table and stood there aimlessly.
‘As it happens,’ Cécile said, ‘I’ve still got two wool dresses and some scarves. Oh, the little darlings will be lovely and warm in them, you’ll see.’
La Maheude found her tongue at last and stammered:
‘Thank you very much, Mademoiselle…You are all very kind…’
Her eyes had filled with tears. She thought the five-franc piece was now secure, and her only worry was how she should ask for it if it wasn’t offered. The maid had still not returned and there was a moment of embarrassed silence. The little ones clung to their mother’s skirts and gazed wide-eyed at the brioche.
‘Are these your only two?’ asked Mme Grégoire, for something to say.
‘Oh no, Madame. I have seven.’
M. Grégoire, who had gone back to reading his newspaper, gave an indignant start:
‘Seven children? But whatever for, in God’s name?’ ‘It’s unwise,’ the old lady said softly.
La Maheude gestured vaguely by way of apology. What could you do? It wasn’t something you thought about, a child just came along, naturally. And then when it was grown, it brought in some money and generally kept things going. In their house, for example, they could have managed if it weren’t for Grandpa who was getting all stiff and for the fact that out of the whole bunch of them only her eldest daughter and two of her sons were yet old enough to work down the mine. But you still had to feed the little ones all the same, even though they didn’t do anything.
‘So,’ Mme Grégoire continued, ‘have you all been working in the mine for long?’
La Maheude’s wan face lit up in a grin:
‘Oh, yes, indeed we have…Myself, I worked down the mine till I was twenty. When I had my second, the doctor said it would be the death of me, because apparently it was doing something nasty to my bones. Anyway, that’s when I got married, and then there was enough for me to do round the house…But on my husband’s side now…They’ve been working down the mine since for ever. As far back as my grandfather’s grandfather…well, no one knows exactly, but since the very start anyway, when they began digging for coal over at Réquillart.’
M. Grégoire gazed pensively at this woman and her pitiful children, at their waxen flesh and their colourless hair, at the process of degeneration evident in their stunted growth, at the anaemia that was gradually eating away at them, at the baleful ugliness of the starving. There was another silence, and all that could be heard was the sound of the coal burning and releasing the occasional spurt of gas. The moist, warm air in the room was heavy with the cosiness of domestic ease that brings peaceful slumber to contented bourgeois hearths.
‘What can she be doing?’ cried Cécile impatiently. ‘Mélanie, do go up and tell her that the parcel is at the bottom of the wardrobe, on the left.’
Meanwhile M. Grégoire voiced aloud the conclusions to which he had been brought by the sight of these hungry people.
‘Life can be hard, it is very true; but, my good woman, it must be said that the workers are not always sensible…I mean, for example, instead of putting a few sous to one side the way countryfolk do, the miners just drink and run up debts, so that in the end there’s nothing left for them to feed their families on.’
‘Monsieur is quite right,’ La Maheude replied evenly. ‘We don’t always follow the straight and narrow. That’s what I keep telling those good-for-nothings when they start complaining…But I’m one of the lucky ones, my husband doesn’t drink. Mind you, sometimes, when there’s a party on a Sunday night, he’ll have a few too many; but it never goes any further than that. And what’s so good about him is that before we married he used to drink like a bloody fish, if you’ll pardon the expression …And yet, you know, his being sensible like that doesn’t really get us any further. There are days, like today for instance, when you could turn out every drawer in our house and you wouldn’t find a single coin.’
She wanted to get them thinking about the five-franc piece, and she continued in her flat monotone, explaining to them how they had come to be in such serious debt, how it had all begun, in small stages at first, and then grown to the point where it consumed everything they had. They’d make their regular repayments every fortnight, but then one day the
y’d find themselves behind with the instalments, and that was it, they never managed to catch up again. The gap got wider and wider, and then the men got fed up working when it didn’t even allow them to pay off their debts. Stuff that for a lark, they’d say! If things went on like this, they’d never be clear till the day they died. Anyway, people needed to see the whole picture: a collier needed his beer simply to clear the soot from his throat. That was how it started, and then when things went badly he’d never be out of the bar. So perhaps, not that anyone was to blame, mind, but all the same, perhaps the workers were just not paid enough.
‘But,’ said Mme Grégoire, ‘I thought the Company paid for your rent and heating.’
La Maheude cast a sideways glance at the coal blazing in the fireplace.
‘Oh, yes, they give us coal all right. It’s not wonderful, but at least it burns…As for the rent, it’s only six francs a month, which may not seem very much but sometimes it’s mighty hard to find…Like today, for example, you could search me till the cows come home but you wouldn’t find a single sou on me. Where there’s nothing, there’s nothing.’
The lady and gentleman fell silent, and as they reclined comfortably in their armchairs they began to find this display of poverty increasingly tiresome and upsetting. Afraid that she had offended them, La Maheude added with the calm and equitable air of a practical woman:
‘Not that I’m complaining, of course. That’s how things are, one’s got to make the best of it. Especially as even if we were to try and do something about it, we probably wouldn’t manage to change anything anyway…The wisest thing in the end, don’t you think, Monsieur, Madame, is to try and go about your business honestly and accept the place where the good Lord has put you.’
M. Grégoire agreed heartily.
‘With such sentiments as those, my good woman, one can rise above misfortune.’
Honorine and Mélanie finally brought the parcel. Cécile undid it and produced the two dresses. She added some scarves and even some stockings and mittens. They would all fit just beautifully, and hastily she bid the maids wrap the selected garments, for her piano teacher had just arrived and she was beginning to usher mother and children towards the door.
‘We really are very short,’ stammered La Maheude. ‘If you could just spare a five-franc piece…’
The words stuck in her throat for the Maheu family were proud and did not beg. Cécile looked anxiously towards her father; but he refused point blank with the air of one called upon to perform a painful duty.
‘No, it is not our custom. We simply cannot.’
Then, moved by the look of distress on the mother’s face, Cécile wanted to give the children something extra. They hadn’t taken their eyes off the brioche, so she cut two slices which she handed to them.
‘Here, these are for you.’
Then she took them back and asked for an old newspaper.
‘Wait, you can share them with your brothers and sisters.’ With her parents looking on affectionately, Cécile finally bundled them out. And these poor mites who had no bread to eat went on their way, respectfully bearing this brioche1 in tiny hands that were numb with cold.
La Maheude dragged her children along the cobblestone road, seeing neither the empty fields nor the black mud nor the huge, pale sky curving overhead. On her way back through Montsou, she strode purposefully into Maigrat’s shop and begged him so hard that she finally left with two loaves, some coffee and butter, and even the five-franc piece she had been wanting, since the man also lent money at an extortionate rate of interest. In fact it wasn’t herself he was after, it was Catherine, as La Maheude understood when he told her to send her daughter to collect the rest of the provisions. They would soon see. Catherine would slap him the minute he laid a finger on her.
III
Eleven o’clock struck at the little church in Village Two Hundred and Forty, a brick chapel in which Father Joire came to say Mass on Sundays. From the school next door, which was also built of brick, the sound of children reciting their lessons could be heard even though the windows were shut to keep out the cold. Between the four great blocks of uniform housing, the broad avenues of tiny back-to-back gardens lay deserted; ravaged by winter, they made a sorry sight with their marly soil and the bumps and smudges of their last remaining vegetables. Indoors, soup was being prepared; smoke rose from the chimneys, and here and there along the rows of houses a woman would emerge, open another door, and disappear again. Even though it wasn’t raining, the grey sky was so heavy with moisture that drain-pipes dripped steadily into the water-butts that stood all along each pavement. This village had simply been plonked down in the middle of the vast plateau, surrounded by black roads as though by a border of condolence, and the only cheerful note was provided by the regular bands of red roof tiles, constantly washed clean by the rain.
On her return La Maheude made a detour to buy some potatoes from the wife of a supervisor, who still had some of last year’s crop left. Behind a row of scraggy poplars, which were the only trees to be seen in this flat terrain, a group of buildings stood apart from the rest, a series of houses arranged in fours and each surrounded by its own garden. Since the Company had reserved this new development for the deputies, the workers had dubbed this corner of their hamlet the First Estate, just as they called their own part of the village Never-Never-Land by way of cheerful, ironic comment on their debt-ridden penury.
‘Oof. Here we are at last,’ said La Maheude as, laden with parcels, she bundled Lénore and Henri into their house all covered in mud and now thoroughly walked off their feet.
In front of the fire Estelle lay screaming in Alzire’s arms. The latter, having run out of sugar and not knowing how to keep Estelle quiet, had decided to pretend to offer her her breast. This often did the trick. But she was just a sickly eight-year-old, and when she opened her dress this time and pressed the child’s mouth to her emaciated chest, it merely made Estelle cross to suck the skin and find that nothing came.
‘Here, give her to me!’ her mother shouted as soon as her hands were free. ‘We shan’t be able to hear ourselves think.’
Once she had drawn from her bodice a breast as heavy as a swollen wineskin and the bawling child had latched on to the spout, there was immediate quiet, and they could finally talk. Everything else was fine, the little housewife had kept the fire going and swept and tidied the room. And in the silence they could hear Grandpa snoring away upstairs, with the same rhythmic snore that had not faltered for an instant.
‘Goodness, look at all these things!’ Alzire said softly, smiling at the sight of the groceries. ‘I can make the soup if you want, Mum.’
The table was covered: one parcel of clothes, two loaves of bread, potatoes, butter, coffee, chicory and half a pound of brawn.
‘Oh, yes, the soup,’ said La Maheude wearily. ‘We’d need to go and pick some sorrel and pull up some leeks…No, I’ll make some later for the men…Put some potatoes on to boil just now, and we’ll have them with a bit of butter…And some coffee, too, eh? Don’t forget the coffee!’
But then she suddenly remembered the brioche. She looked at Lénore and Henri, who were now fighting on the floor, for they had already recovered their strength and their spirits, and she saw that their hands were empty. The greedy little things had quietly eaten the lot on the way home! She gave them a smack just as Alzire, who was hanging the cooking-pot over the fire, tried to mollify her.
‘Leave them be, Mum. If you’re thinking of me, I really don’t mind about the brioche. They were hungry, what with walking all that way.’
Midday struck, and the sound of clogs could be heard as the children came out of school. The potatoes were ready, and the coffee, to which more than an equivalent amount of chicory had been added to supplement it, was gurgling through the filter in large drops. They cleared a corner of the table, but only La Maheude took her food there, since the three children were happy to eat off their knees; and as the little boy ate with mute intent, he kept tu
rning round to look at the brawn, excited by the greasepaper wrapping but not saying a word.
La Maheude was sipping her coffee, her hands clenched round the glass to warm them, when old Bonnemort came downstairs. Usually he got up later, and his lunch would be waiting for him on the stove. But today he started grumbling because there was no soup. Then, after his daughter-in-law had told him that beggars can’t be choosers, he ate his potatoes in silence. From time to time he would get up and go and spit into the ashes, by way of keeping the place clean. Then he would return to his chair and sit there in a slumped heap, rolling the food round at the back of his mouth, with his head bowed and a vacant expression on his face.
‘Oh, Mum, I forgot, next door came round – ’
Her mother cut her short:
‘I’m not talking to that woman.’
She was still seething with resentment against La Levaque, who had pleaded poverty the day before and refused to lend her a sou, whereas she happened to know that La Levaque had plenty of money just then, seeing as Bouteloup, her lodger, had paid her his fortnight in advance. People in the village rarely lent money to each other.
‘But that reminds me,’ La Maheude continued. ‘Put a millful of coffee in some paper, and I’ll take it round to La Pierronne. She lent me some the day before yesterday.’
When her daughter had prepared the package, she told Alzire that she would be back at once to start cooking the men’s soup. Then off she went with Estelle in her arms, leaving old Bonnemort slowly chewing his potatoes, and Lénore and Henri fighting over the peelings that had fallen on the floor.
Rather than go round by the street, La Maheude cut straight across the gardens just in case La Levaque should try to speak to her. As it happened, her own garden backed on to the Pierrons’, and there was a hole in the dilapidated trellis through which they were able to visit each other. The shared well was located there, serving four households. Next to it, behind a sorry clump of lilac, was the carin, a low shed full of old tools where they also reared a succession of rabbits to be eaten on special occasions. One o’clock struck, coffee-time, when not a soul was to be seen at window or door – except for one man, one of the stonemen, who was digging his little vegetable patch until it was time to go to work. He did not look up. But as La Maheude reached the row of houses on the other side, she was surprised to see a gentleman and two ladies come past the church. She stopped for a moment and then recognized them: it was Mme Hennebeau, who was showing her guests round the village, the man with the ribbon in his buttonhole and the lady in a fur coat.